RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mercenary-power-play-emmanuel-macron-vladimir-putin-wagner-group-mali-11645211128?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

France said last week that it will withdraw military forces from Mali, where Paris has led a counterterrorism campaign for nearly a decade. This is a setback for the fight against Islamic extremism, but it is also a victory for a Russian power play in Africa.

“We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday of the Malian government. He added that the pullout of some 2,400 French troops could take as long as six months as France considers where in the region to re-station forces fighting Islamic State and al Qaeda.

Mr. Macron acknowledged that Mali is free to choose its security partners but warned that Russian mercenaries with “predatory intentions” were arriving in the country. “The junta which is in power after two coups d’etats considers them to be the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism,” he said.

Mr. Macron is referring to Russia’s guns-for-hire Wagner Group. U.S. Africa Command recently confirmed the presence of the Russians and American officials have suggested they would be paid $10 million a month, though Mali denies it. The mercenaries’ numbers and influence are likely to grow as France pulls out.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/why-russia-wont-invade-ukrainistan/

No one wants Ukrainistan, least of all Vladimir Putin.

Its GDP of $98 billion (in constant 2015 US dollars), down 43% since 1989, falls in between Ethiopia and Angola on the World Bank tables. Its population has shrunk to just 35 million according to the country’s National Academy of Science from 52 million in 1989, rather than the 48 million reported in the official census, because nearly half of the working-age population has left. Its corruption ranking stands at 112 out of 116 countries surveyed by Transparency International.

Ukraine has some gas reserves but Russia has roughly ten times more, far more than it can transport without massive investments in infrastructure. Otherwise, Ukraine has no natural resources of note apart from farmland – and Russia already is the world’s largest wheat exporter.

Seizing Ukraine, in short, would be vastly more trouble than it is worth to Russia. To compare Putin’s threats to Ukraine with Hitler’s march eastwards offends common sense: There is no “there” there in Ukraine, nothing Russia wants: no Lebensraum, no productive population, no oil fields or other assets to be acquired by conquest.

If Putin doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, just what does he want?

He has three objectives.

The first is to thwart NATO expansion into Ukraine with the attendant threat of US missiles stationed on Russia’s border. As Jack Matlock, US envoy to Moscow 1987-1991, explained February 15 (“Is the Ukraine ‘crisis just another U.S. charade”), there is an analogy to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: The US put medium-range missiles in Turkey, so Russia retaliated by putting missiles in Cuba – and withdrew them in return for a US agreement to remove the missiles in Turkey.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18207/elite-capture

[Elite capture] is a crucial tool of [China’s] success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

[Each] of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policy making. Each will say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue the companies they run are truly international…

Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title Principles, of his “personal hero,” Wang Qishan. “Every time I speak with Wang,” Dalio swooned, “I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe.” Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and known as Xi’s enforcer. The Economist called him “the most feared man in China.” But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.

Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Almost everything [Apple] sells is manufactured in China, and the iPhone has more than 23 percent of the market for phones in China. Apple has repeatedly been accused of benefiting from the forced labor of Chinese Uyghurs, which the company denies.

As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the “world’s No.1 power,” I came across the phrase “elite capture” — their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.

“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18246/france-specter-islam

In any case, Islam, though it has contributed to numerous civilizations, isn’t itself a civilization but a religion. It is the French who, in their universities and such places as the Louvre Museum, bring dozens of different civilizations, cultures and arts under the “Islamic” label. That, in turn, legitimizes those, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Khomeinists, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and ISIS among others, who reduce Islam to a political ideology or even a slogan under which they pursue their quest for power.

Over the past three decades, the French state has granted official recognition to over 3,000 mosques and Islamic associations, enabling them to benefit from tax exemptions and other pecuniary advantages worth billions of euros.

France does have an “Islamic problem”. But it is of its own making….

“A specter is haunting France, the specter of Islam!”

This is the message that, with variations of intonation and nuance, comes from almost all of the dozen or so declared candidates in France’s forthcoming presidential election.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/18/the-view-from-budapest/

I’m writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a few days, it is not difficult to understand why. Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party, is a real-life experiment in government under a framework of “national conservatism.” Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.

Western media typically covers Orban in hysterical fashion, accusing him of autocracy, crypto-fascism, or outright thuggery. It is difficult to believe that any of these left-wing keyboard warriors have ever met Orban, much less spent any time with him. I spent a couple of hours standing directly next to him earlier this week, when he met with a small group of visiting media, think-tankers, and other public figure types. That meeting was illuminating.

From firsthand experience, I can attest that the prime minister is nothing like the caricature the media portrays him as. He is personally quite funny, gregarious, and engaging, and he handled even critical questions with aplomb.

Perhaps most surprising for blue-checked Twitterati types who view him as a power-hungry, barbaric European dictator, he is also a genuine conservative intellectual. Orban spent time at Oxford, and he dedicates one day every week to reading up and immersing himself in substantive political reading material. To borrow a popular online phrase, he has “done the reading.”

At our meeting, Balazs Orban (no relation), the prime minister’s political director, expressly referred to the Hungarian government’s philosophical lodestar as national conservatism, even name-checking one of national conservatism’s chief intellectual architects, Yoram Hazony (full disclosure: my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague). In the past, Orban has also embraced the mantle of “illiberal democracy.” That may sound rhetorically jarring to overly sensitized Western ears, but it amounts to the same criticism of the liberal order as that which is aired by American national conservatives and “postliberals.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-ottawa-convoy/#slide-1

Ottawa – Tensions are running high in Ottawa as hundreds of police officers in riot gear make a coordinated push to dismantle the trucker convoy that arrived in the city in late January. Police arrested at least two leading organizers of the convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, on Thursday night. But today, law-enforcement officers are engaged in a much larger-scale action, surrounding the encampments and methodically moving in to make arrests and disperse protesters, and even positioning armed officers on nearby roofs. It’s by far the most aggressive show of state force against the convoy to date.

This morning, large numbers of police officers — arriving on foot, on horseback, and in armored cars — began amassing around the convoy. By 11 a.m., lines of police officers on multiple sides of the encampments had begun to push inward, cutting off the main entrances and shrinking the reach of the convoy. They were met with loud and angry shouts of indignation from the truckers, who assembled to meet them on the other side of the line. But with some exceptions — at certain junctures, the officers’ advances pushed into a crowd of protesters who refused to move, leading to a sort of pushing match between the convoy crowd and the line of police — there were few physical altercations. Those who did resist police advances were promptly arrested and hauled out.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18236/iran-support-houthi-terrorists

According to Western security officials, the high level meetings between senior members of the Houthi terrorist organisation and Iran illustrate the close coordination that is taking place between Iran and the Houthis over the rebel group’s terrorist operations.

“There has been mounting evidence of deepening cooperation between Iran and the Houthis, especially in terms of Iran supplying the Houthis with sophisticated weapons, such as missiles and drones,” a senior Western security official told the author. “The meetings that took place in January prior to the attacks on the UAE suggest the cooperation between Iran and the Houthis has increased dramatically.”

At the very least, the Biden administration needs to concentrate its energies on both confronting the Houthis’ terrorist network, as well as providing its Gulf allies with the protection they need to defend themselves against further attacks by the Iranian-backed rebels.

Following last month’s attacks, senior UAE officials renewed calls for the Biden administration to reimpose Washington’s terrorist designation against the Houthis, which was lifted soon after US President Joe Biden took office last year as a goodwill gesture to Iran.

Since then there has been a marked increase in Houthi-inspired terrorist activity…..

New evidence revealing how Houthi rebels in Yemen cooperate with their main backers in Iran has shed fresh light on how Tehran is actively directing their terrorist activities.

Iran’s links with the Yemeni-based terrorist group have been under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after the Houthis launched a series of unprovoked attacks against the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last month, killing three civilians and injuring six more.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/boris-johnsons-foreign-policy-magical-thinking-bruce-thornton/

Last week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson published an op-ed about the brewing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And, no surprise, it comprised a catalogue of “new world order” idealism of the sort we’ve watched crash and burn for the last three decades. Vladimir Putin would not be impressed were he to read it, any more than he’s worried about the modest increases in NATO forces near his borders, since the U.S. Commander-in-Chief already announced that we will not go to war over Ukraine. Plus the NATO countries are still disunited over how to respond should Putin go kinetic.

Once again, the hard questions of what threatens our interests and how to meet those threats are ignored in favor of bankrupt idealism and magical thinking.

Amidst all the virtue-signaling and braggadocios rhetoric, Johnson offers this strange sentence that epitomizes that idealism: “If I may adapt some famous words: All nations are created equal, they are endowed by international law with certain inalienable rights, and first among these is the right not to have their territory seized, or their foreign policy dictated at gunpoint, by a powerful neighbor.”

Talk about a false analogy. No, nations are not all “created equal” and  do not have “unalienable rights,” but only such rights as are created by treaties with other nations, not by shared universal “norms” or “values.” Nor, as Johnson implies, is “international law” like “nature and nature’s God” that the Founder believed make certain human rights unalienable, a feature of our inherent humanity, not a gift of earthly power. International law, in contrast, is the contingent product of treaties negotiated by sovereign nations that enter into such agreements in order to further their national interests. They do not reflect universal morality or values, and so are regularly violated, or simply abandoned, as those interests shift.

Historical milestones

Historical milestones shape the ethos, vision and policy-making of ethnic, religious and national entities.

For example, the ethos, vision and policy-making of the Jewish State has been largely shaped by the centrality of the Land of Israel since Abraham the Patriarch (2150 BCE), through Moses and the Biblical Exodus (1300 BCE), the kingdom of David (1000 BCE), the destruction of Jerusalem (586 BCE and 70 CE) and the ensuing exiles, the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid (167-160 BCE) and Roman (66-73 CE and 132-136 CE) Empires, modern day Zionism, the Holocaust and the 1948/49 War of Independence.  There is a 4,000-year-old attachment to the land of Israel, physically, spiritually, historically, religiously, culturally, linguistically and nationally.

Muslim entities consider the 7th century emergence of Islam as a pivotal component of their contemporary school curriculum, culture, worldview, vision and policy-making.

Historical milestones shaping the Ayatollahs’ vision and policy-making

*The ferocious 14-century-old rivalry between the Sunni majority and Shiite minority over the succession of the Prophet Muhammad;

*The 680 CE killing of Hussein ibn-Ali, the Shiite grandson of Muhammad in the Battle of Karbala by a much stronger army of the Caliph Yazid. The Battle of Karbala was the “big bang” of the Sunni-Shiite schism;

*The annual commemoration of Hussein’s martyrdom and betrayal through public processions on the Day of Ashura, which includes beating one’s chest and bloody self-flagellating;

*The dominance of Shiite dynasties during the 10th-11th centuries in parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Arabia, Yemen, Tunisia, Sicily, and the Caspian area.